Repeat A Big Lie Often Enough

Every time some nutbar inflicts his mania upon the world with a firearm, you can practically count the seconds until the left will start to try to jam the round pegs of this nation’s law-abiding gun owners into the square holes of the “nut with a gun” meme.  It’s also good sport to predict exactly what they will lie about to try to make that happen.

Alex Gerber in the Washington Times takes a high-profile whack at it. Indeed, it might be safe to say you can tell Gerber is lying whenever his fingers are moving above the keyboard:

Ours is a country, unique among industrialized societies, that has become insensitive to murder.

Nothing unique about our “insensitivity” – murder rates in Russia in the past decade, and Brazil for most of the past several decades, dwarf US rates. 

How else to explain the “American gun culture” that tolerates some 14,000 firearm murders, including 400 children, in 2005 — the last year statistics are available?

 “How else to explain”?  Simple:  a lie and an out-of-context statement.

In few areas is John Edwards’ “Two Americas” meme so accurate as this; there are indeed “Two American Gun Cultures”.  One – the law-abiding gun-owning citizens, the NRA, the people who hold legal concealed carry permits in 40 states – are intensely law abiding, less than 1% as likely to infract the law as the general public.  The other – drug dealers, gang bangers, criminals in general, self-declared islands of immunity to the niceties of American law. 

The “gun murders” in this country are committed by the latter, condemned and in many cases thwarted by the former.

 Guns are easily purchased despite laws about waiting periods and background checks. The Seung-hui Cho story indicates the restrictions posed by the 1968 Gun Control Act are enforced only in the breach.

Again, cynical buncombe.  The system in Virginia had a fatal flaw that didn’t put his involuntary commitment for mental health issues on the public record so that his “Permit to Purchase” could have been flagged.   

Firearm murder rates 100 times higher in the United States than, for example, in Britain or Japan, are stark evidence our gun control laws are a joke.

No, that’s evidence that our murder-control laws are a joke.  And rates of other violent crimes – assaults and hot burglaries, for example – have risen past  US levels in the UK since…

…they banned guns!

Japan is indeed a tranquil country; it is also intensely homogenous, and their people tolerate police brutality on a level that would set the American media and the ACLU aflame with righteous rage were it transposed here. 

Gerber takes a break for lying to be merely stupid:

What is not a joke is the absurd contention of the NRA gunslingers that if the Virginia Tech students had been armed there would have been far fewer victims. When would this powerful gun lobby have our students start arming themselves — at the high school or college level or in kindergarten? No civilized nation legitimizes packing a pistol while attending school.

Untrue, of course; Israeli teacher routinely “pack” pistols at school, to prevent precisely this form of crime.

Gerber’s brand of “logic” is worthy of the Minnesota Monitor, of course; college students are adults, not kindergartners. 

Repeated polls have shown the majority of our citizens favor much tougher gun control laws.

Untrue, of course.  Over the past twenty years, when asked the hopelessly broad question “do you favor tougher gun controls”, a majority answers “yes” – but when asked to go into specifics – the actual “tougher gun control laws” Gerber bleats about – the numbers drop into the cellar. 

President Clinton attempted gun control in 1994 when he banned military type assault weapons that have no sane civilian use, but President Bush allowed this modest gun control measure to lapse in 2004.

And with good reason; in a world where any self-respecting cocaine trafficker can get fully-automatic submachine guns and assault rifles for a black-market song, and where illegal “hot” weapons on the street are available to any punk with $50, the ban was yet another superfluous feel-good measure for bureaucrats who didn’t dare address the real issue – a failed war on drugs. 

Early detection and treatment of the mentally ill is important but is not an adequate answer to firearm shootings gone amok. Mental health specialists are far outnumbered by the mentally disturbed and depressed youth of our country.

 Gerber states this as an absolute.  OK, Alex – why is it not an adequate answer?

The debate over gun control is dominated by the interpretation of the Second Amendment to our Constitution — widely acclaimed as “the finest document ever devised by man.” In the one-sentence Second Amendment, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms should not be infringed,” the key word is security, but not the kind of security that is now relevant to our nation.

Most rational constitutional scholars, including Sanford Levinson and Laurence Tribe, are deserting that interpretation, with the Supreme Court likely soon to follow.

As voiced in the Federalist Papers, the Second Amendment was concerned with the tyrannical kingdoms overseas, which would be “speedily overturned” were the people allowed to bear arms — an “advantage the nation would possess — and serve as a barrier to the despotism of the Old World.”
By today’s standards, crime was no problem in the largely rural New World whose inhabitants seldom locked their doors. Aside from rifles for hunting, firearms played a minor role in everyday life. Unknown in Colonial days were rival gangs engaged in drive-by shootings, drug-related homicide, road rage gunfire and, certainly, students shooting other students.

Again – as usual – patent rubbish.  While the world has changed, the colonists, living as they did mostly in rural areas, were on their own against most of whatever disorder did spring out at them – much as a typical homeowner, downtown office worker or driver is against today’s burglars, rapists and carjackers.   

Alex Gerber, a clinical professor of surgery, emeritus, at the University of Southern California, is a former health care consultant to the White House and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Ah.  Good to see the WashTimes can find a real expert to speak up for the totalitarian case.

6 thoughts on “Repeat A Big Lie Often Enough

  1. Mitch, just a bit of critique: It’s relatively easy to “jam the round pegs of this nation’s law-abiding gun owners into the square holes of the “nut with a gun” meme”
    Now if those pegs happened to be square, the paradigm would shift dramatically.

  2. “And a wonderful TV show would be reborn!”

    Only problem is that Jami Gertz and Sarah Jessica Parker are too old to play Muffy and Patty.

  3. I wasn’t involved in the movement when Levinson’s piece came out, back in 1989, but the folks I know who where say it’s hard to underestimate the impact it had. Here was somebody with solid academic and liberal credentials arguing — in detail, with cites — exactly the same thing that conservatives and libertarians (some with solid academic credentials, some without) had been saying for, well, forever: that the 2nd Amendment isn’t about either the National Guard or duck hunting.

    And the only thing the Levinson was mugged by was, well, honesty.

  4. I remember the Levinson piece when it came out. Hard to describe the effect it had; it gave me hope, in many ways.

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